The present invention is directed to customer premises equipment (CPE) and, more particularly, to local or home networks of CPE.
Call announce and call screening are services provided by local telephone companies as part of the Call Screening, Monitoring and Intercept (CSMI) service. The services provide customers with the identity of the source of an incoming call or an incoming second call waiting (SCW) call. Before or after the first ring, typically, the central office (CO) sends a message to the customer's telephone set or CPE set that instructs the set to go off-hook and activate its speaker path so that the central office can announce the name or telephone number of the person making the incoming call. After the announcement is completed, the central office sends another message to the telephone or CPE instructing the set to go back on-hook so that the customer may answer the call, if the customer desires.
Alternatively, the call announce function is carried out by a customer's telephone answering device (TAD), digital telephone answering device (DTAD) or other CPE. The central office (CO) or voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) server sends calling line identification (CLID) data or second call waiting identification (SCWID) data to the TAD, DTAD or CPE. The customer's device parses the number field of the data, accesses a list of pre-recorded number vocalizations to select those corresponding to the numbers in the number field as well as, possibly, their position in the number field, and then delivers the sequence of number vocalizations to the device's speaker which announces the calling number. The device may also, or instead, match part or all of the CLID data to one or more records of voice tags stored in a database and then deliver the corresponding voice tags to the device's speaker. After the announcement is completed, the customer may answer the call, if desired.
Call screening may also be provided by the customer's TAD, DTAD or other CPE. When an incoming telephone call is not answered within a preselected interval or preselected number of rings, the TAD, DTAD or other CPE takes the line off-hook and then sends an outgoing voice message over the telephone line to the caller. When the caller replies to the outgoing voice message with an incoming voice message, the incoming voice message is recorded and is also delivered to the device's speaker. The customer may listen to the incoming message and may answer the call, if desired, while the incoming voice message is being announced.
The call announce and call screening features permit a customer to decide beforehand whether to answer the call, and thus the customer need not waste time responding to an unwanted call or caller. Further, the features allow a customer to prioritize between two incoming calls when a second call waiting call is received, even when both calls are desired, so that the customer can decide whether or not to interrupt a first call to respond to a second incoming call. Moreover, the information provided by the call announce or call screening features may be all that is needed by the customer so that the customer need not interrupt other activities to actually answer the call.
The incoming message however, can usually be heard clearly only while the customer is in the room where the telephone set, TAD, DTAD or other CPE is located and/or in close proximity thereto. If the customer is in another room, is not near the device or is otherwise occupied and unable to move to a location where the message can be heard more clearly, the customer may miss the message or not hear the message until the customer subsequently replays it.
It is therefore desirable that the call announce and call screening messages be heard on other devices that are connected to the customer's telephone set, TAD, DTAD or other CPE.